Usually, when you encounter an item with no definitive price tag, it is because the item is significantly overpriced. When a customer must ask for the price, the salesman can estimate wealth, gullibility, and many other things before finding a way to screw the customer. It also provides an opportunity to sell the customer, rather than merely counting on the item and its price to convince the buyer.

In simple terms, forcing another to be open about his wants, and being closed off on your own, gives a man a decided bargaining advantage.

Lately, we’ve seen this at work with Antifa, BLM, #TheResistance, and other assorted left-wing groups. Grievances are produced, from slavery, to the plight of Native Americans, to American foreign adventures in the Middle East. Being honest with ourselves, some of these grievances have at least a historical merit to them. But for such leftist groups, the price for burying the grievance is obfuscated behind buzzwords and jargon. We must dismantle the cisheteropatriarchy, we must check our privilege, we must become a positive advocate for change. Everything from microaggressions to cultural appropriation are cited as examples of these things.

But I ask, what change?

Allow me to step into the shoes of one of Babylon 5’s villains, Mr. Morden, and ask the question: “what do you want?”

Well, leftists? What do you want? What is your price for putting away identity politics and your incessant portrayals of right-wing racism, sexism, homophobia, and islamophobia? These portrayals have silenced some of us, enraged others, and sent many conservatives running for the political closet. And once there, they still voted right-wing. Thus we now have one Donald J. Trump, despite all predictions to the contrary.

Some of us, like the esteemed Francis at Liberty’s Torch,have made peace with the incessant accusations and said something to the effect of “if you think that means I’m a racist then fine, I’m a racist. Now what?” Others, like myself, maintain that the portrayal of racism as the greatest of all evils is a mistake, dredged up because of the relative historical freshness of Nazi evil, and America’s own struggles with slavery. These evils most Americans are familiar with, but judging from the proliferation of Che Guevara t-shirts, the evils of Communism are less well understood.

And so racism becomes the number one evil in America, a sort of 21st century red scare, except there are even fewer to play the part of the reds (and many more actual reds).

All of that is immaterial, however. What is the end goal of the leftist? What does he want? What does his ideal America (or world, for those of a globalist persuasion) look like? Who gets to live there? What becomes of us and others who do not fit this progressive vision of the future?

When asked, leftists are often quite silent on the price. Just today, one explained that I should google the matter (never mind that I’ve exhausted google as a resource for this) because she didn’t want to “perform free emotional labor” on my behalf. Naming the price is now something that, in itself, costs money. Imagine if you asked the salesman what the price of a thing was, and he replied “you have to pay me to find out.”

Like the little psychological trick of decreasing sticker shock with slick salesmanship, the left understands that by hiding the price, they increase the possibility of ripping off some gullible idiot. Namely, us. And it works well enough on some. Enough that the thought of being accused of racism or prejudice is enough to elicit outright fear in many, not just an answer to the question.

Once an accusation of racism is leveled, very little is sufficient to dismiss it. Do you have many friends of the race in question? RationalWiki tells you that this is insufficient (after all, Hitler liked one Jew). You’re still a racist. What if, instead, you married a black woman, loved her and her family, and had a child with her? Well, you’re still a racist, because as some Puppy-kickers explained on Facebook (they have since deleted the posts in question, but I saved a screenshot, and Brad Torgersen can confirm it), black pussy doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. The Puppy-kickers even made this into a t-shirt. This argument was recently resurrected on Twitter by Talib Kweli Greene where he explained that if you marry an Indian woman, you’re still a racist, you just like Indian pussy.

So your friends, family, and relationships are dismissed. The accusation still stands. And remember, you are guilty unless proven innocent. And to prove your innocence, you must embrace leftist politics. That is the only accepted coin. And even by doing that, you would still have to abase yourself thoroughly and completely. Meanwhile, a woman who murdered her own 4 year old son applied to Harvard, and was denied. Naturally, this had something to do with racism, according to Vox.com. Of course it has little or nothing to do with being a convicted murderer of a child.

Ultimately, the choice is this: convert to leftism, or risk being tarred as a racist with no possible way to prove otherwise, because you are guilty until proven innocent, and all evidence except leftist political sentiments will be summarily dismissed as insufficient.

Meanwhile, a reasonable man might be inclined to ask the price of buying this weapon off the left. What would it take for them to put it away?

Their rants and raves on this matter are difficult to parse. Ta-Nehisi Coates penned a long piece in support of reparations, and when I first read it I expected a concrete answer to the question “what do you want?” Instead, we were treated to a historical lecture on the plight of blacks in America. We already knew this. Everybody knows about slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination against blacks. How can anyone not know? The media has been bombarding us with these things for as long as I’ve been alive. And if the media wasn’t, BLM sure has been making a rather more raw effort at doing so. We get it. These things happened, and blacks got a raw deal.

What I want is a price. What are the demands? What do they really want?

I suspect the reason the demands aren’t named is that the sticker shock is likely to be quite mighty. I recall reading some time ago (and I can’t remember where presently, but if any of my readers know, please reply in the comments) that one black leader suggested a one-time payoff of $1 million to each black citizen. That bill would come out to approximately $36 trillion, approximately double the GDP of the United States, and likely an impossible sum. But to be honest, I suspect the left’s real demands would be much more expensive, and involve something much more Marxist than a massive one-time payment. The left would probably want to ensure the racist right-wingers never got to express their racism again, and would need to be actively suppressed. Somebody has to be the kulaks when things go bad, after all.

In the end, it’s just like Barack Obama’s campaign of hope and change. What change? How much will it cost? Hopeful for whom? These are questions the left leaves unanswered. There are never any (accurate) price tags on their merchandise. And so, I’ve no interest in buying.

The story is pretty simple, a British father who lost his wife to cancer years before took his 13 year old daughter on a short little vacation. He booked a room at the Travelodge, and went to check in, and the only type of room they had left was a double room, so he said he’d take it…

…then a whole dramatic escapade ensues where the Travelodge manager interrogates the customer, calls the police, and accuses the father of being a pedo. Police take the child away from her father, and interrogate her as to whether not he is her father.

It’s absurd that a meddling hotel manager would do this, of course, but at the same time consider the blindness the British authorities had toward the Rotherham rape cases. If the supposed perp is a Muslim or non-white, the practice is largely ignored out of fear that the authorities will be tarred as racist. If a British man takes his daughter on a vacation, he is subjected to ludicrous accusations with absolutely no evidence whatsoever behind them. Then both father and daughter are interrogated by the police.

This is rather like the absurdity of old grandmothers being subjected to random deep TSA screenings.

I’ve taken to calling this phenomenon Reverse Profiling, insofar as whatever the common sense profiling might suggest, the authorities must do the exact opposite. If, for instance, purple Martians were known to be more likely to commit random acts of terrorism, those same purple Martians must be let in without any screening whatsoever. And if old grandmothers were known to rarely, if ever, commit said acts, the book must be thrown at as many of them as possible.

The hotel chain, meanwhile, crafts lies to try and justify their actions:

Mr Darwell complained and says that the company are now falsely claiming that he tried to pay by cash in order to justify their suspicion.

‘They say I insisted on paying cash when I arrived but its rubbish. I had already paid by credit card before I even arrived,’ he added.

The increasing involvement of companies in policing and politics is starting to become quite worrisome to me. They are becoming a cog in demands of the State. And meanwhile, SJWs make demands that companies embrace political correctness, that is to say Leftism. We like in a bizarre world wherein Capitalism is, itself, being bent to the will of Leftism. It’s beyond crony Capitalism and into some kind of bizarre hybrid not entirely dissimilar from Chinese Market Communism, or whatever they are calling their system these days.

‘Our colleagues are trained based on current national guidelines from the NSPCC, the police and other agencies and in the past, hotel team actions have led to successful intervention to protect young people.

The government said to jump… and even in a blatant case of obvious misjudgment, they jumped. A decree comes down from on high that hotels should do (x), no matter how ridiculous or stupid it may be, and off they go.

I bet dollars to donuts that the hotel manager wouldn’t have said a damn thing if the father had been a Pakistani and his daughter had been in a burkha. And just who do you think the odds favor in cases of kiddy diddling? After all, Mohammed himself was okay with the practice, so long as they were older than 9.

Imagine, even, that the father had been, instead, a mother. Feminists would have crawled out of the woodwork to make this an instance of sexism, and proof of the evil Patriarchy. But they’ll be silent for this. No outrage, because deep down, most of them would probably think the man deserved it because he was male.

But let’s be honest, if it were a mother and her child, nobody would have batted an eyelash anyway. Only white men are evil, after all, didntcha know?

Like this:

Just a quickie for today. Over at Sarah’s place, I read this little gem:

Look, it’s not my fault. I was bit by International Socialism as a child and it’s the sort of thing that causes an allergy for life. Oh, yeah, and International ANYTHING day is a socialist thing, because they never fully realized that they didn’t control the whole world. Or they didn’t care and just wanted to make their rubes believe they were worldwide. The Happy People of Brutopia celebrated whatever day they were ordered, and they marched in orderly ranks past the red draped stands, and Socialism would Conquer the WORLD.

Right. So that was part of why I blew up. I hate “International” this and that, and the idea behind it. Whatever good it is supposed to do never actually works where needed, and it does very bad things everywhere else.

It’s true. International (insert thing here) is almost invariably a Socialism thing. If there was an International Shoe Shiner’s Day, I’d presume the shoe shiners in question were probably Commies. Workers of the World Unite! That’s the rallying cry. Only, since the Frankfurt school popularized the idea of scapegoating various demographic groups as privileged, or whatever, they now have more flexibility in slogan generation.

Women of the world unite! Not-white people of the world unite (white people go away)! Transgendered people of the world unite! Muslim lesbian genderqueer androgynous robot anime furries of the world unite!

Whatever. Leftist agitprop has become functionally retarded. I can’t believe people still legitimately fall for this bullshit. But RadFems are full of contradictions. Observe:

Yeah… I got nothing.

RadFems are all up in arms when a man holds open a door, or for whatever reason (probably blindness), when he shows any kind of sexual interest in them. But they are silent about Islamic oppression of women. Yes, I know, it’s a tired cliche. Us rightists always talk about Islam when RadFems start complaining about this or that. But it’s true.

I’ve spoken at length about the darker side of the feminist psyche, how they actually crave oppression. Just not, it should be noted, from you. The barbarian bad boys outside the gate are much more interesting, I suppose. That’s why Islam gets a pass, and why the nastiest, most violent assholes in the club walk away with swooning feminists, arm-in-arm, dedicated fighters of the patriarchy taking a break by letting some thug have his way with them.

In essence, the woman above is asking for it. Just not, it should be noted, from you. Where’s her romantic migrant-in-whatever-jihadis-wear to enslave her and honor-kill her?

International Socialism is full of such contradictions. The Progressive stack is confused about who is the greater victim, the white woman, or the black gay man? What if the woman is a Muslim, or the black man of Hispanic descent? These are the great conundrums of the left, the questions that burn in their psyches, underneath layers of pink pussy hats.

A Day Without Women, they said. No, no. There are plenty of women. I imagine Sarah Hoyt kept on writing, and, of course, my wife cooked up some good buffalo wings for dinner yesterday. My friend, who is an MD, went to work, same as always, caring for her patients (I imagine many of them were women, also). No, it wasn’t a day without women. It was a day without Socialist RadFems. Society did not crumble, we didn’t lose power, starve to death, or suffer great tragedy. The bulk of America hardly even noticed their absence. And, to be frank, I wish we had more days like that.

Like this:

So a long time ago, in a universe far, far away… I was in High School. Okay, 20 years ago. But whatever. I remember sitting in Spanish class while the teacher yapped to the administrators about some such thing, during which the class predictably descended into chaos. Theoretically, we were supposed to be discussing certain words relating to government, but somehow the topic went into politics, and not, I should note, in Spanish.

Somebody accused me of being “Republican” and suddenly conversation stopped, and all eyes turned to me. Now, since we were all in high school at the time, saying one is a member of a political party was academic at best. But in those days, as now, being called “Republican” might as well have meant being called a Neo-Nazi. I said that I was too young to be in a party, but that I considered myself somewhere in the middle, politically. I was not really Republican, but neither was I a Democrat.

“So you’re against helping people,” the accuser replied. To him, membership in the Democratic party was a prerequisite to not being a hateful bigot. And bear in mind that this was the 90s. I imagine today’s schools suffer much worse, now that Social Justice rhetoric has had more time to breed. We went back and forth for a time, and it was a remarkably civil debate for being a bunch of high schoolers talking about political matters they knew nothing about. But those inclined to watch the debate nodded and agreed that if you’re not a Democrat, you’re at least suspect in this matter.

And so the notion stuck with me. “You’re against helping people.” It’s the most common rhetorical charge laid upon anyone who is not a radical Leftist. We can go on about how the Leftists are wrong about this, and that we believe that it is best to help people help themselves, and that Capitalism is a wave that lifts all boats, and so on and so forth. But it never really penetrates, does it? All such replies fall on deaf ears, and even knowing these things as I do, I have a hard time considering my replies equal to the task of dismantling this myth. Matching dialectic to rhetoric doesn’t work.

But there is a response to this, one that is equally effective, equally simple, and perhaps even stronger, for it correlates with human nature well enough.

No. I’m against helping you.

That’s right. Does it sound harsh? Perhaps it is, but remember, they accused you of an untruth whereas you, at least, responded with a truth. I like helping people. I have helped my brother on occasion, and my father more frequently. I have helped friends, and they have helped me. I have done favors for my in-laws, and given money to friends when they needed help. Most of those in my life know that I can be counted on reliably even in the worst of times. I’m not against helping people as a principle. I’m against helping accusatory assholes. I’m against helping people I don’t know, people I have no connection to.

Or, aimed at my accuser, I’m against helping you.

If SJWs say that I’m against helping black people, or women, or gay people… wrong. I have helped people who are black, I have helped women, and I have helped gay people. But the difference is, those I have helped are people I know, people in my life in some capacity or another, and whom I know will help me in turn (or who may have already helped me in some capacity), should I find myself in a bad place. No, I’m just against helping you. If Black Lives Matter tells me that I’m against helping blacks… wrong. I’m against helping your group, specifically.

If a welfare queen with 15 kids (yes, one exists here in Tampa — she was big news for awhile) says “I want you to help me,” I will say no. And if someone holds a vote to determine if the government should reach into my pocket, and take money from me, and give it to her to help her, my vote will be no. I’m against helping you. If someone else wishes to help the woman, then that is their business. I will decline.

It’s not because you are poor, or black, or a woman, or whatever other myriad of identities you may or may not have. It is because I don’t know you, you are not in my life in any capacity, and I’m pretty certain you would not help me, were the situation reversed. So no, I’m against helping you, specifically.

I prioritize helping my family, and my friends, and business partners, and so on, over helping random people I don’t know, and with whom I have no dealings. Yet even so, there are times I have chosen to do that, on my own account. I donate time and money to a local cancer patient charity, because it pleases me to do so. But that is my business, and you don’t get to force me to do it. Indeed, if I were forced to give money to the charity, the act would lose its luster for me. I am for helping that group, specifically.

So next time an SJW says something like that to you “you’re against (x)” just shake your head sadly, and tell them that they are mistaken. There are plenty of people in the world whom you would help, some whom you may even give your life for. It is just simply that the SJW and his preferred victim groups are not among them. “I like helping people,” you might say, “I’m just against helping you. Sorry, bub.”

Like this:

As someone who exists somewhere on the Right-wing spectrum, I am often asked how I could be so homophobic, or hateful to trans folks. SJWs and other radical Leftists think that to be Right-wing means you hate (in no particular order) women, non-whites, gay people, trans people, poor people, and pretty much everyone on the planet. Of course, this doesn’t even pass the sniff test. If anyone on Earth perpetrates crimes against the aforementioned peoples, it certainly isn’t Conservative white guys.

Nonetheless, the perception remains. And worse, even those of a generally moderate or Left-wing persuasion who even listen respectfully to a Right-winger are denounced as hateful bigots. I know many moderately Left-wing people who are denounced just for talking to me. Especially if they are of the aforementioned demographics. Social Justice demands that each group stay on its assigned ideological reservation. They call it “staying in your lane”. Here is a classical example, sent to someone who is trans:

The SJW admits something fascinating here: they legitimately think they own people. In other words, they demand absolute compliance, a form of slavery. Original Reddit Post Here.

Now, an SJW might say something like this: ‘well, Dystopic, you are a Christian and so you hate gays and want to hurt them. You are transphobic because you are cisgender.’ The thing is, I have DJed for the gay community for most of my adult life. Not because I am particularly supportive of gays, mind you. But rather because I just don’t care enough to make an issue out of it.

SJWs think each individual is either an absolute ally, entirely with the preferred narrative in all respects, or they are a hateful enemy. Yet the vast majority of human beings (in the West, at least – the Islamic world may be a little different) just don’t care strongly one way or another. Are you gay? Good for you. Mind your own business, and I don’t care. I will neither praise you incessantly for your gayness, nor lob you off of a building for it. I think likewise of trans folk, or any number of other demographic groups. I have friends who are gay, even one or two who are trans (or at least perform in drag shows, anyway). Their gayness, or transness, or whatever you want to call it is irrelevant to me one way or the other, because they posses other characteristics that make them worthy of friendship.

Of course, such friends also know that I generally don’t want to hear about the graphic details of what they do at home, either. But, to be fair, I don’t want to hear about what my parents do behind closed doors either. Or anybody, really. It’s not necessarily a gay or straight thing so much as it is people these days often disclose more than they ought to about their sex lives. Generally speaking, I don’t want to know.

The problem, of course, is that SJWs categorically fail to mind their own business. The comic artist Patriarchie explains for us:

Mind your own business and don’t act like an obnoxious asshole and most people won’t care what you do with your sex life.

Now, this is the part of the story where the SJW will assume that, because I am Christian, I must hate gays. No. For one, that’s not how it works. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the Christian faiths knows that the idea is to hate the sin, not the sinner. Sinners are to be saved, if at all possible. But there is a valid point in that Christianity doesn’t look favorably on the practice. The Christian will not kill you for being gay, or think of you as less human for your gayness. But if you ask him if he personally approves of the practice, the answer will be no. If asked to participate in your explicitly gay activities, he may decline. Then again, he might act as I have, and be perfectly happy to DJ a gay club for reasons unrelated to your homosexuality.

In my case, the clubs I have spun for have treated me very well, enjoy my music, and have been very loyal to me over the years — even when opportunities existed to screw me over. The music business is a tough, competitive world, and loyal people are very hard to find. Whether they are gay or not is meaningless next to that (and to be fair, a good deal of my club business is still from straight clubs, also).

The point being, the worst a Christian will do is suggest that promoting the behavior at church isn’t a good idea and, perhaps, he may decline to bake a cake for your ceremonies. Big whoop. Why do you need his approval anyway? None of these things hurt you. A Muslim beheading gays, or shooting them in a club, is a very different matter from a man who doesn’t want to participate in your ceremony.

Yet SJWs demand this approval. They require that I step off from my largely neutral position, and bow before them, dedicating my life to the pursuit of whatever political goal they fancy. Anything less is hateful, they say. Everything is black and white with them, no middle ground, no grey exists.

However, the truth of the matter is far worse. For where I may care little one way or the other about your sexuality, I am at least honest about this neutrality. SJWs pretend to care for these groups, but then kick them to the curb and purge them as soon as their political use has expired.

Consider that many decades ago, the political Left was very enamored with white working class union workers. These were manufacturers, makers of widgets and things. They were typically lower middle class, not wealthy, and were thus the darling of a Left that concerned itself constantly with the plight of the workers. Today, you will find SJWs decrying these evil, hateful bigots. Rednecks and trailer trash, they will be called. SJWs will suggest that they are racist, sexist, homophobic, backward troglodytes and if someone killed them all (or at least prevented them from voting)… why wouldn’t that be dandy?

This was once a group as adored by the Left as Muslims are today.

Today, we are seeing the first indications that white gay men are being expelled from membership in the oppressed classes club. They are still white, you see, and cisgender. And white gay men tend to make more money than women, so they must be sexist, also. It was even suggested that gay men refusing to date women is, paradoxically, discriminatory. Sorry gay white men, you are being expelled, just as white working class men were once expelled, likewise. Trans folks, how soon before your white members are expelled from the club? Or, perhaps, it will be black men who are expelled next. You never can tell with them.

This should come as no surprise to anyone with sense. Support for mass Muslim immigration is incompatible with support for gays, trans folks, and a whole host of other demographics anyway. The obviousness of this is overlooked constantly. Blacks suffer more from illegal immigration stealing jobs than any other demographic. So how can the SJWs simultaneously support both groups? The political Left cannot cater to all of these separate groups without contradicting themselves. But they try, so long as a demographic is useful to them politically. Whenever the inherent contradictions assert themselves, they just blame white men, a convenient scapegoat and perpetual boogeyman.

The point is, they don’t really care about you. All of this rhetoric about oppressed classes is just a tool to make you a slave of their ideology. Like the screencap posted above, they literally believe that they own you. When I say I don’t care, I genuinely mean it. When they say they do care, they are lying.

Who, then, is truly hateful? I speak truth to you. They speak lies, in the tongues of legalese and plausible deniability. And when you are no longer useful to them, they will dispose of you, treating you just as they now treat me.

They claim to have fought and won rights for all the oppressed peoples of the world. But what have they done, truly? Was it illegal to be transgender before the SJWs came? No. Were gays lobbed off of buildings before the coming of Social Justice? Not in America. They may say that they have won for you the right to marry, but even this is, pardon the pun, a queer thing. You see, I long advocated that the government didn’t need to stick its hands in the marriage business in the first place. Why must I have the blessing of the State to marry?

No, many Conservatives and Libertarians would have been happy to expel the government from this thing, and let people do privately as they wished. Have a notarized and witnessed contract to handle matters of inheritance, property, contract termination, and who may decide for you life and death decisions at the hospital. The rest is a matter between individuals, family, God, or whomever you wish to involve.

This would have legalized gay marriage by default without requiring the tyrannical provision that others must participate against their will in the thing. They didn’t fight to grant gays the right to marry, they fought to expand the reach of the government into the lives of gays, where they already had such reach into the lives of straight people. Congratulations, SJWs subjected you to more government, then claimed this as victory.

SJWs might say, alternatively, that they have won acceptance for you. That now people are de facto forbidden from insulting you for your gayness, or transness, under penalty of denunciation, defriending, loss of job, etc… But is this a good thing? Those who don’t like what you do still don’t like what you do. You have not changed their minds through reasoned debate, you have merely forced silence upon them. Those who are neutral on the matter are still neutral on the matter. Indeed, the tyranny of SJWs forcing their opinions upon those who are not involved may have actually made enemies of some of those previously inclined to neutrality.

Consider this matter of trans folks and bathrooms. Previously, bathrooms were governed by a pretty reliable set of customs. If you were male, you went into one room. If female, you went into another. But small children were often exempted, and were customarily allowed to enter with either parent. Those individuals who might suffer rare genetic disorders (XXY or Intersex), or who were transgender, generally used the restroom which most closely corresponded to their appearance. This arrangement worked fine. If there was the occasional exception to the rule, well most people figured out how to get along anyway.

Oh, the occasional violent asshole might object. One of my friends related a story to me wherein he was at a biker bar in a bad part of town, as he was wont to frequent dive bars, and a very effeminate gay man wandered in. It was not a good place for an effeminate man of either orientation, but his gayness definitely did not serve him well in this place. When he went to use the bathroom, a trio of bikers went in after him. My friend knew well enough what that meant. He and a few others followed the bikers, and saved the gay man from a beat down.

But, answer me this SJWs, do you believe demanding special bathroom laws will prevent bikers in the bad part of town from acting this way? Or will your actions inflame them more, when the trans man, about to receive a beat down, states “but the law says I can go to the bathroom I want!” The fact is, as with anything, that the assholes who hate you are still going to hate you after such demands are made because your actions did not change their minds.

Meanwhile, my friend, an ex-bouncer, will readily defend a gay man under assault, not because he particularly likes them, but because he doesn’t think a man deserves to be beaten down just because he accidentally wandered into a bar full of assholes.

SJW demands are trivial. They change nothing. Every bit of progress they claim to have made is suspect. And you are not beholden to them for such marginal assistance, given grudgingly by a group of elitists using you to further their political agenda. They don’t own you. And they will betray you sooner or later. It’s what they do.

At least we are honest when we say that, while we don’t necessarily personally approve of all the things you do, we acknowledge you as human beings worthy of the same rights and responsibilities as any other of our countrymen. We don’t see you as political tools. And the people that truly hate you, those who want to harm you, are our enemies, also.

Don’t listen to the SJWs and other Regressives. Or, in a few decades, they will call you by the same names they now call me. You will be trailer trash to them. Scum. Bigots. Because they will have found a new class to pretend to agitate for, and you will be old news.

Meanwhile, us Right-wing folk will be in the same place we are today: “hey, I don’t really want to hear about your sex life, but if you need a friend, or maybe a good DJ… you let me know, okay?”

I am privileged. This is true, but not in the way the left thinks. The other day I disagreed on social media with a woman about another program to take from workers and give to parasites. She said that she had been middle class and was now poor and I couldn’t understand because I am privileged. I thought about it and replied that she was right. That answer is the seed of this post. Many of you are even more privileged than I, but I’m going to tell about my privilege now.

I was born in Appalachia in the middle of the twentieth century. Well it was the middle of the twentieth everywhere else, in most of Appalachia it was still somewhere between the nineteenth century and the mid twentieth. Many places were still using “coal oil” lanterns and indoor plumbing was rare. I was an adult before living in a house that had an indoor toilet. Central heat was a coal fired stove in the middle of the living room and a wood stove in the kitchen. Being the first one up in zero weather was an adventure. Could you start a fire before the cold started to hurt?

Many people I knew, much of my family in fact, lived in what were known as tar-paper shacks. This was a wood frame covered with the tar paper used by roofers for waterproofing. I believe I was privileged enough that I never lived in one myself. I’m not sure, we followed the jobs and work was hard to come by then.

There is an assumption that if you’re a white middle class man, you have suffered no pain. That life was easier for you, somehow, or that people conspired to pave your way to wealth and power. The point, of course, is to ensure that the white man is last in line for jobs, and first in line for paying the bill.

I remember some SJW once pointing out to me that I would never understand what it was like to suffer domestic abuse. Except that, growing up, my stepmother (whom my father mercifully divorced eventually) was pretty much every evil stepmother stereotype rolled into one. And she was very physically abusive. So no, I told the SJW. I don’t understand what it is like to be a grown adult who is abused by his or her spouse… but I know what it’s like to be a child beaten and abused by an adult. Does that count?

But unlike SJWs who worship victim status, I look back on my experience with shame. I remember my stepmother punching me in the face when I was 11 or 12, I think, and the fact is, she was a short and smallish woman. I easily had the strength, even then, to stand up to her and hit her back hard enough that she would never hurt me again. But I didn’t, and to this day I am ashamed of this failure. To me, it was a lesson in defending yourself, to never stand idle when you should fight back.

In that I am, like Sanford Begley, privileged.

The point of all this is that SJWs only see a middle class white man who is more successful, perhaps, than they are. Someone who is happier and more content with life. And the envy, the jealousy, grows within them. They will say and do anything to drag you down, and to elevate themselves over you. They think that their experiences in life must be the worst, the greatest tragedy, and that you, by virtue of your skin color and genitals, could not have suffered equal or greater hardship in life.

But SJWs, you need to understand something. I learned from the shame of my inaction all those years ago. The next time someone tries to punch me in the face (physically or metaphorically), it will not go so easily for them.